In the wake of the financial crisis, most developed countries have entered a period of prolonged budgetary austerity. While the success of austerity programs is still unclear, it is also an open question what success would mean for activist government in the long run. This paper rejects the...

This paper challenges the focus on budget deficits that permeates the literature on fiscal policy. It analyzes countries running budget surpluses and asks why some of them preserved these surpluses while others did not. Whereas several OECD members recorded surpluses for just a few years,...

Vor dem Hintergrund der Simmel'schen Wertbildungstheorie wird die Frage nach der Bedeutung und den Folgen des Konsums von Modefälschungen gestellt. Erklärungen für die Wertentstehung von Kopien und deren Verhältnis zu Originalen werden mit qualitativen Daten aus Konsumentenbefragungen...

Prior studies that try to explain who gets tenure and why remain inconclusive, especially on whether non-meritocratic factors influence who becomes a professor. On the basis of career and publication data of virtually all sociologists working in German sociology departments, we test how...

The rise of the consolidation state follows the displacement of the classical tax state, or Steuerstaat, by what I have called the debt state, a process that began in the 1980s in all rich capitalist democracies. Consolidation is the contemporary response to the "fiscal crisis of the state"...

As Hacker and Pierson (2010) have observed, politics is primarily organization: "organized combat." To understand the outcomes of politics, we have to look at how it is organized over time: by whom and with what resources? I take Sweden as an example of how politics as organized combat has...

Recent literature on the European debt crisis emphasizes that rising external trade and lending imbalances between the European Monetary Union's (EMU) Northern and Southern member states served as a crucial determinant behind speculative divergence between these two regions. However, these...

Do employers in coordinated market economies (CME's) actively defend the non-liberal, market- constraining institutions upon which their strategic coordination and competitive success depends? This paper revisits the debate over firms' employer preferences with an in-depth examination of...

Regional disparities within the European Union have always been perceived as an impediment to monetary integration. This is why discussions on a joint currency, from their very beginning, were linked to compensatory payments in the form of regional policy payments. Structural assistance to poor...

An effect of the informalization of production and distribution processes affecting the garment industry has been the spread of sweatshops in areas of industrial eclipse. Whilst the proliferation of these economies is usually analyzed as an outcome of sweeping macro trends, such as the...